During the years of the 1930′s Popular Front, the Communist International directed the Soviet intelligence-led world-wide agitprop campaign of Communists and fellow travelers of the Left against fascism, while covertly the intelligence services of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were secretly cooperating in various sinister endeavors. (See Stephen Koch, Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West, The Free Press/Macmillian, Inc., 1994; republished as Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Muzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals, Enigma Books, 2004).

Professor Koch meticulously details the manipulation by the Soviets’ master propagandist Willi Munzenberg of thousands of European and American progressives in the inner-war period of the 1920s and 1930s by his vast publishing network and interlocking front organizations under the covert direction of the Communist International (Comintern) and the Soviet secret services of the NKVD and the GRU. He particularly concentrates upon the intellectual elite that fell under Munzenberg’s sway in this cultural war against the West. This includes such persons as Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Andre’ Malraux, Andre’ Gide, Pablo Picasso, Dorothy Parker, George Grosz, Lincoln Steffens, John Dos Passos, Bertolt Brecht, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett and Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

Those in the leadership of the Comintern apparat had a name for those naïve fools who fell for their disinformation propaganda – “useful idiots.”

As this article demonstrates there are still celebrity “useful idiots” among us.

At the Nelson Mandela Memorial Service President Obama praised Mandela as “the last great liberator of the 20th century” and urged the world to continue his life’s work for justice and equality. What exactly did he mean by this?

Britain is turning into a ‘colour-coded society’, with the UK’s whites and ethnic minorities choosing to live apart. That’s according to a new study that warns of ‘comfort-zone segregation’, which could lead to division and hostility between the communities. RT’s Sara Firth has more on the worrying trend.